The website from which a got this image, Strange and Wonderful Things (a title after me own little heart), compares these funky little flowers to “little orange penguins marching over the rocks”—and yeah, I can see that.

But I see a bunch of old aunties in wide hats toting their bins back from the fields, or maybe the market.

Clouds are masses of frozen liquids suspended in the atmosphere, and one can use SCIENCE to determine how they form and what their shapes say about conditions in the atmosphere and that’s all for the good. Similarly, one can use the tools of SCIENCE to discover that c. uniflora is “distantly related to Foxglove and Generiads”, and that the flower is pollinated by birds who eat the white bits of the bloom.

But sometimes clouds are castles or armies or profiles of Abe Lincoln, and sometimes flowers are little orange penguins or bin-toting old aunties in wide hats.

Okay, so this might be a little sad—soused waxwings binge on fermented berries, then die of “ruptured livers or ‘flying under the influence of ethanol’ “—but sometimes the wonderfully weird is a little sad.

And it’s not just avian alcoholism that makes this story wonderfully weird, but that humans have created “holding tanks” in a (yes!) rehab facility in Whitehorse, Yukon.

Already, drunken flying accidents have sent four birds to the Whitehorse headquarters for rehabilitation in a series of specially equipped “holding tanks”: Small cages with water and bedding, that are kept quiet and dark “so that [the waxwings] can have a good recovery.” One of the birds, notably, arrived still smeared with the residue of alcoholic berries.

One of the birds, notably, arrived still smeared with the residue of alcoholic berries: of course she did.

In any case, the facility is prepared for

“a couple big flocks, and you can see them flying a bit erratically, trying to avoid things,” said Meghan Larivee with the territory’s Animal Health Unit. . . .